Rethinking the Water Bottle

Definition: “Digital disruption refers to changes enabled by digital technologies that occur at a pace and magnitude that disrupt established ways of value creation, social interactions, doing business and more generally our thinking.”

The idea that every business will be able to continue to do business as they have forever is a fallacy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that disruption will occur to every industry tomorrow or even next year. However, it has already occurred to many industries such as:

Blockbuster – Netflix

Borders Books – Amazon

Taxis – Uber

Hotels – AirBnB

Gillette – Dollar Shave Club

These are well-known examples and, frankly, the tip of the iceberg.

Where does this disruption come from?

Typically disruption comes from those who have the vision to understand how technology can better serve customers’ needs before the customer does.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs

Consider the common water bottle. A group of U of M students spent a Google Startup weekend in Minneapolis thinking up a new smart water bottle that tracked water intake and synced to a mobile app on a smartphone. The result: HidrateSpark. By looking at the experience of water consumption, and water bottles, in a whole new way this team conceived of a container that not only drives a healthier lifestyle through proper hydration, but which gathers data to be used with other IoT platforms to give a more holistic look at an individual’s health. Imagine analyzing the water consumption data as it relates to FitBit data, sleep data, and diet data. That information will be incredibly valuable to customers and businesses alike.

In coming posts, I hope to cover specific examples of disruption in greater detail and how industries, in general, have the opportunity to explore it.

How is this applicable to you? Are you in an industry that has become stale? You may be prime for disruption.

If you have any questions regarding digital disruption or would like to explore opportunities to disrupt shoot us an info request at info@costrategix.com. We offer regular Workshops for companies seeking to reimagine their business.